A tight Belgian action-thriller, Night Call (La Nuit se Traîne), starts with the old adage: wrong place, wrong time. Mady Bala (Jonathan Feltre), a young student who moonlights as a locksmith, receives an emergency call from a woman named Claire (Natacha Krief). Desperate to get into Claire’s apartment, Mady rushes to help her out—but it’s not her apartment.
Written and directed by Belgian filmmaker Michiel Blanchart, Night Call takes place in the streets of Brussels amid the country’s Black Lives Matter protests. Mady is a Black man, and the apartment that Claire wants him to open belongs to a white man. When the door is opened, Claire pushes her way to take a bag full of cash and flee the scene. As the dots connect, Mady knows he’s a party to something that he shouldn’t be. When someone winds up dead, Mady has a choice to make: call the cops or try to get by on his own.
The money Claire stole, though, is only connected to the dead man in the apartment. It really belongs to a brutal mobster named Yannick (Romain Duris), who blames Mady for the incident and chases Mady across the streets of Brussels with his goons in tow and no thought or care for any of the collateral damage that leaves a trail of bodies and damage behind them.
Night Call (2024) uses every minute of its tight runtime to build a heart-pounding pace.
This 91-minute film takes place over the course of one night. It hits the gas in the first 10 minutes and doesn’t let up for a second. No time is wasted. What started as an ordinary night shift turns into a brutal descent into violence as each encounter becomes more vicious. A crime thriller on the one hand and hardcore action on the other, Night Call wonderfully pulls from different genres, inspirations, and iconic actioners to tell its kinetic story.
Where Mady is concerned, his resiliency is unmatched, and his ingenuity keeps him alive. Watching Jonathan Feltre as Mady pushes to survive, think quickly on his feet, and patch up his wounds with everyday objects is the grit that makes a good action hero. Additionally, as the film moves toward its ending, the setpieces get larger but still maintain the grounded mid-budget feel with all the volume of a loud blockbuster actioner.
Blanchart and his team understand how to choreograph a chase. Essential to this is their understanding of how to use small spaces, architecture, and the environment around them. The heart-pounding pace that builds is thanks to Feltre’s running and frantic worry, but it’s also set by the changing environments and Brussels’s embrace.
Night Call’s real problem is its inability to grapple with the subject matter it pays lip service to. The film shows a Black Lives Matter protest and clearly shows that Mady is aware of his identity in this situation. But none of that comes to fruition, and the film feels haphazardly discarded at the end.
An attempt at social commentary is too easily cast aside to mean much as Night Call ends.
The ending stalls the film. Why should Mady risk his life for Claire? Why should the audience, more specifically, watch a cop shoot Mady for a woman he does not know and, in the course of one night, hasn’t had enough time to build a connection to? Why should Mady sacrifice himself for a white woman? Night Call uses a historical moment in time across the world to frame its story and yet, it feels like it’s gazing at the BLM movement and Mady’s identity rather than tackling it.
Mady has to run because the cops will blame him for a murder he didn’t commit. Mady is alone, running from heinous people because he has nowhere to turn to. Why? Because Maddy is Black. Mady’s identity drives all of his choices and yet, there is no direct engagement with it from Mady’s perspective. It leaves everything to play out just as we would expect, and it’s worse for it.
Night Call is one hell of a kinetic film with chases and action sequences that are absolute stunners in the genre. Feltre’s performance as Mady is wonderful, and the young actor carries himself well against older actors to the point that I want to see what he does next. But while you can get over a rough first or second act by sticking the third act landing, that grace doesn’t flow the other way. Night Call is a solid film, a great chase, and an action wonder. But narratively, it just can’t carry its own theme’s weight.
Night Call is in select theaters on January 17, 2025 (French-language film with English subtitles).
Night Call (2024)
6.5/10
TL;DR
While you can get over a rough first or second act by sticking the third act landing, that grace doesn’t flow the other way. Night Call is a solid film, a great chase, and an action wonder. But narratively, it just can’t carry its own theme’s weight.